This article first appeared in Landscape Architecture Magazine in August 2017. One of the joys of travel, even of armchair travel, is the discovery of euphonious place names. I’ve driven through both Humptulips, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, and Quonochontaug, in Rhode Island. Both of these are names that flow off the tongue (well, with a […]

Here is a little piece on landscape, technology, and nationhood (or the lack thereof) I wrote for the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit Eleven publication for 2018. It’s part of the thinking I’m doing towards our upcoming ‘Landscape Citizenships’ symposium. https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? How will we get […]

Ed Wall and I, along with the amazing Jane Wolff from the University of Toronto, are organising and hosting a conference this autumn that seeks to explore interrelations with landscapes as the foundation to citizenships. Please see details here: https://landscapecitizenships.wordpress.com …and follow on Twitter @Citizen_Land We have an amazing advisory group that includes: Jill Desimini, Harvard […]

The following is an excerpt from my essay, ‘Making Meaning: Utopian Method for Minds, Bodies, and Media in Architectural Design’ published by the Open Library of Humanities. The full essay is available to all, delightfully, as a completely free and open access publication here: https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.109/ The imaginative ‘play’ that we call design has a special space—the […]

This October 10th, the London office of WATG released this image of a ‘greener future’ for London’s Fleet Street in support of the ongoing proposal to make London a ‘National Park City’. Dan Raven-Ellison, the proposal’s key protagonist, has a flair for PR and has effectively repackaged the worthy, but duller-sounding project to improve London’s […]

This is an excerpt from my chapter in Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays, due out this October, which I co-edited with Ed Wall. My writing is in superb company in our book: Ross Exo Adams, Camillo Boano, Paul Cureton, Jill Desimini, Murray Fraser, Maria Guidici, William Hunter, Jane Hutton, Katya Larina, Don Mitchell, Peg Rawes, […]

“I really want to make the whole city like this,” says Martí Franch of Estudi Martí Franch (EMF), speaking of his vision of designing the green infrastructure of Girona, Spain, through a process of enlightened and engaged landscape management. We are sitting in his office, among shelves full of models and a table full of […]

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has switched off the public life support to London’s embattled Garden Bridge, a tempestuous, contested, and deeply symbolic idea that will die tightly clutching a sheaf of contemporary perversions of the civic good, a cautionary portfolio of design’s worst addictions. Its life charts a course through the sordid world […]

“A Word …” is my quarterly column for Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute. Here in the Autumn 2016  issue I talk about the importance of telling a good story. The Autumn issue contains an extensive section featuring the winners of the Landscape Institute Awards.  This year’s Serpentine pavilion, by Bjarke Ingels Group, was welcomed with descriptions in […]

This is published in the new journal Testing-Ground, by the Advanced Landscape and Urbanism research group in the Department of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London. Nearly sixty years ago, J.B. Jackson wrote one of the most insightful essays about landscape ever written, “The Stranger’s Path”. Jackson’s warm, gentle, and wise voice and keen observation have been […]